Our Guiding Principles

Support the music industry in its evolution to eliminate the historical issues around rights and royalty accuracy, transparency, and speed of payments

Adopt the new business models being innovated in the industry, empower existing industry participants to respond to new opportunities, and help move the industry away from outdated paradigms and barriers

Enable music companies to respond to the demands of copyright owners: quick payments, high transparency, better accountability, and more control

The Industry Today

The music industry is being criticized for inaccurate artist compensation and distrust; artists are more vocal, informed and tech savvy, demanding to be paid faster and more accurately and are seeking alternatives to the status quo

Every dollar of revenue earned is shared amongst many parties but the data surrounding that revenue is masked and highly restricted, often only verifiable through costly and time consuming audits

Rights data is often inaccurate and not visible to the rights holders or to the parties who share in the interest of a composition or recording, resulting in delays and errors in obtaining use licenses and in paying out royalties

Paid subscriptions and streaming are causing significantly more data in music, adding complexity to the industry and its workflow, and crushing the legacy technology which supports it

Continued advances in technologies and the digital music environment has provided accelerated interest in tech-based music business model innovation

Unmet Needs

Many companies are tracking creators’ rights with spreadsheets or using reportedly suboptimal legacy music administration products

Lack of visibility permeates the industry; music companies of all sizes have difficulty understanding their catalog, tracing their royalties, and resolving rights and royalty disputes

There are multiple centralized sources of rights and royalties data with subsets of data exchanged via EDI standards

Creators have no overall visibility into their plays and sales across the multitude of industry sources, nor to the middlemen who collect and process the royalties along the way

Industry organizations need support in taking advantage of the continued tech-based business model innovation

Essential Value

Serves established music company models - through our Rights and Royalties Administration component - but enables a path to new blockchain and shared data enabled paradigms

Improves speed and accuracy of royalty payments to rights holders

A complete view into royalties via the Royalty Chain and the Participant Portal - especially important for singer/song writers and to creators with deals and licenses spanning multiple organizations

Why Blockchain: Growing Complexity, Antiquated Solutions

Over 10 years ago, the majors recognized the value of centralizing regional databases into global repositories and undertook large technology initiatives to create their own conflict-free single sources of truth

Immutable royalty ledgers were created and shared between affiliates, offering transparency and visibility into pipeline transactions

Since then, we have been watching the data volume grow and have been managing the acceleration of that growth in real-time. Support for these data volumes has required a ground-up architectural approach, modern tools/technologies, and the power of cloud computing

Such large data storage requires a distributed database similar to those used by major content providers such as Netflix and Facebook. The design naturally operated with the same principle concept as blockchain - a distributed ledger where data never changes and only evolves forward, enabling multiple machines to safely coordinate handling data at a massive scale

WHY BLOCKCHAIN: Trust and Efficiency

Blockchain provides the transparency being craved by the most important participants in the industry: the creators

The entire music industry is built around the concept of multiple parties with complementary interests sharing in a single asset - the song. Why should this data be kept in private copies in incompatible systems and require synchronization through ineffective methods? Blockchain empowers the industry to share the data in a controlled, mutually beneficial environment where conflicts are known and resolvable

Immutable, permissioned ledgers provide security yet accountability

Smart contracts allow for the automatic execution on the terms of agreements and assets